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What is software development?
What causes software complexity?
These are two fundamental questions. Even as computers are becoming faster, new languages, tools and frameworks are being developed, there feels like fundamental problems with software development. Understanding them will hopefully let understand why programming often feels broken, and why it feels like we have in many ways as an industry hit a wall.
What is Programming?
Core Ideas
- Programming can be thought of a set of transformations: turning human concepts down a chain of intermediate steps to something executable by a computer.
- All programming constructs: programs, frameworks, libraries, languages, etc, are ways of expressing concepts at different levels down this chain.
The Transform Stack
Let us consider what I will call the transform stack.
On the top you have Human Level concepts, and on the bottom you have computer level instructions.
In be beginning programming was difficult because we had to go express our code all the way at the bottom of the stack. You had to construct binary instructions. As this was unwieldy, we would add another language like machine code that would standardize and give meaning to binary instructions.
Operating at these levels was extremely time consuming as they were so different from the way people thought. Consequently people created higher level languages and compilers to turn human readable code into machine code.
The computer-focused stack, and the Human-focused Stack
Everything below the Programming Language is what I call the computer focused stack. What makes them computer focused, is that the design requirements for these tools are focused around representing something executable by a computer. High level languages are used to represent data structures, functions/subroutines, iteration, control schemas. Compilers turn it into lower level…
